From the 1940s through the 1960s, the most innovative movement in the American and international academic world was American studies. Now the last surviving giant of that movement is gone. Daniel Aaron, author of Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism and founder of the Library of America series dedicated to preserving and publicizing the work of America’s major writers, died on April 30, at the age of 103.

Aaron was part of an academic and intellectual generation in the United States — including Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, Alfred Kazin, Henry Nash Smith, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz, John William Ward, Leo Marx, and Christopher Lasch — that revolutionized our perspectives on American culture. Their books reinterpreted the American past not only for professors and students but also for general readers.

Most American-Studies Programs Today Have Curricula Indistinguishable From the Courses and Syllabi in History or English Departments

Most of the inventors of the American-studies movement were born during the second decade of the 20th century. Many were Jewish (Aaron, Kazin, Hofstadter, Hartz, Boorstin, Marx) and were the children or grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe. All of them reached early adulthood during the Great Depression and World War II. Some were temporarily attracted to the Depression-era Marxism of the American Socialist or Communist Parties. By the end of World War II, they remained on the left, though mostly as liberal Democrats.

Their careers and their work, therefore, were indelibly shaped by America’s struggle with the totalitarian mystique. For them the dominant political figures of their age were Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt. As a consequence, many served during the war, either in combat or as participants in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) or the Office of War Information (precursor of the Fulbright program and the United States Information Agency). In these capacities, both during World War II and the Cold War, their mission was to explain America to the world, a task they undertook in their books and as visiting professors in European, Latin American, and Asian universities.

At the first Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, in 1947, designed to familiarize European students with America’s history, two of the featured speakers were Matthiessen and Kazin. So even as the originators of American studies believed in the uniqueness of America, they were also internationalists; their vision and their audiences were both nationalist and global.

These founders of the American-studies movement dominated academic life in the United States until the late 1960s. Then, as with the country itself, their sense of common purpose disintegrated. As did their audience. In the context of the Vietnam War, racial upheavals, and new waves of immigrants arriving from Latin America and Asia, the phrases the American-studies practitioners loved to invoke — the American mind, the American character, the American experience — had ceased to resonate. There no longer seemed to be a shared, agreed-upon definition of what was “American,” either in the past or the present.

In 1971, Daniel Aaron left Smith College, where he had taught for 30 years, to assume the directorship of the American-studies program at Harvard. Aaron later told me that when he arrived at Harvard, he was informed by Bernard Bailyn (the great Colonial historian and once a student of Perry Miller’s) that whatever its former glories, the American-studies movement was dead, and that Aaron’s job was to give the entire enterprise an honorable burial.

Aaron was bemused. But Bailyn’s epitaph for American studies, or at least for the American-studies movement in its original and classic phase, was uncomfortably acute. By the 1970s and 1980s, the assumptions (often unacknowledged) of the creators of American studies were under attack. A new generation of academics in history and English departments — many of whom had been undergraduate and graduate students during the turmoil of the 1960s — regarded their American-studies elders as too conservative, methodologically and ideologically.

Their criticisms of American studies were often accurate. The creators of the movement were primarily interested in the marquee artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries; they wanted to demonstrate, especially to their audiences overseas, that America had a culture worth admiring. So their heroes were Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Henry Adams, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Missing from this exalted roster were women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Missing also was much awareness of the impact of modern mass culture in the 20th century — especially the effects on “ordinary” Americans of radio, television, and the movies.

Equally unnerving for younger scholars was the post-World War II notion that American history and culture were unique, or even worse, “exceptional.” The rejection of American exceptionalism coincided with the shift in the academic world from postwar liberalism to a post-1960s affection for radical, quasi-Marxist ideas. Above all, the younger generation of scholars dismissed the original American-studies conception of culture as incurably “elitist” — a term of opprobrium among professors on the political left.

It is, of course, hardly news that a younger generation might revolt against the assumptions of its elders. But this particular revolt effectively destroyed American studies as an intellectual and cultural force in the nation’s life.

Most American-studies programs today have curricula indistinguishable from the courses and syllabi in history or English departments. One finds a preoccupation with literary theory and cultural studies rather than with writers, with social history rather than with art or music. It is hard to imagine a professor or a graduate student in American studies today undertaking a book or a dissertation about, say, John Updike or Philip Roth, or about George Gershwin or Cole Porter, or about Edward Hopper or Jackson Pollock. Nor would it be customary — in fact obligatory — for professors in American studies to have had much experience abroad, or much desire to write a book comparing America’s political rhetoric with that of Britain or France or Germany, as Louis Hartz did in The Liberal Tradition in America.

We do not have in American studies today writers like Kazin or Aaron, Hofstadter or Boorstin, Matthiessen or Lasch, who tried to influence an audience that existed beyond the narcissistic confines of the academic world.

What, one wonders, is the special mission of American studies in our time? Where are the American-studies scholars eager to write for general readers, hoping to influence the culture and politics of the United States? Why are we content to speak only to our peers, those 20 other specialists on our turf, in exchange for tenure and professorial status, if not relevance in the outside world?

It was this narrowness, more than any other academic trait, that the founders of the American-studies movement tried to transcend. They dominated academic life for 30 years, and they have been neither superseded nor replaced.

Richard Pells is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books are War Babies: The Generation That Changed America (Cultural History Press, 2014) and Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (Yale University Press, 2011).

Trumbo is an upcoming American, biographical, dramatic film directed by Jay Roach and written by John McNamara starring Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Elle Fanning, Louis C.K., Helen Mirren and John Goodman. The film follows the life of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo during the McCarthy era (based on the biography Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Alexander Cook).

I wrote a whole chapter in my 2nd book, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, about Trumbo, McCarthyism, and the blacklist. Trumbo was probably the most talented of the screenwriters who were blacklisted. And Trumbo did “break” the blacklist in 1960 when he received credit for writing 2 films: Spartacus and Exodus. But earlier, in 1957, he won an Oscar for best screenplay, under a false name, so he couldn’t accept the award! It was very embarassing at the Oscar ceremonies that year.

Although Trumbo was not a war baby (born much earlier in 1905), the war babies grew up (or at least were adolescents) during the McCarthy era. In my book, War Babies: The Generation That Changed America, I describe Carl Bernstein’s experience of having FBI agents tail his family, including showing up at his Bar Mitzvah. And I also describe being allowed to stay home from school in the afternoons in the spring of 1954 so I could watch the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV. Barney Frank had the same experience. And many of us were told by our parents in the 1950s not to do anything that would leave a record, or put our name on a list, or get our pictures taken at a demonstration — lessons we all thankfully ignored in the 1960s.

If you’re interested in all this, there’s a terrific movie, released in 1976, called The Front. It stars (but was not directed by) Woody Allen. It’s a very accurate account of blacklisting in the television industry: most of the events in the movie actually happened, and almost all the actors and the director of the movie had in fact been blacklisted (as the final credits reveal). You can probably get the movie on Netflix. And it may be one of the best acting performances Woody has ever given.

Ava DuVernay’s Selma and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper have both been lavished with praise and award nominations. They are also the focus of intense historical and political controversy. Normally, I don’t believe movies should be judged by their historical accuracy. They are dramas, and occasionally, works of art. But any consideration of these two films can’t be divorced from the events they describe. And as historical interpretation and as drama, I think, Selma is terrible while American Sniper is terrific.

Each movie deals with violence and death. There the similarity ends. DuVernay was a publicist before she became a documentary filmmaker. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Selma combines a documentarian’s effort to record the historical truth with the aura of a public-relations spectacle.

On the other hand, Eastwood has long been a master director. And he has been preoccupied with the ambiguities and gruesomeness of violence through much of his later career: in movies like Unforgiven (1992), Mystic River (2003), and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). Moreover, Eastwood is a consummate storyteller; his tales of haunted characters are revealed to the audience with economy, precision, and eloquence. There are few wasted moments in an Eastwood movie, and little overt social commentary. His focus is almost always on individuals trapped in a snare of their own making.

Academic historians too often judge movies by how faithful the films are to the historical record. But that perspective overlooks the need for films to create characters and to tell a story that will have an emotional impact.

In that sense, DuVernay has the tougher job. She has set out to portray as fully as possible the grand tale of the 1965 civil-rights march from Selma, AL, to the state capital in Montgomery. The purpose of the march was to generate support in the North for a bill to establish and defend the voting rights of African-Americans in the South. DuVernay, therefore, faced the double task of capturing the struggles of the march’s leaders—especially Martin Luther King Jr.—while remaining as historically truthful as possible.

Too often, she fails at both tasks. On the historical and political level, Selma has been reproached for its one-dimensional, if not false, depiction of Lyndon Johnson. In the movie, he is depicted as opposing the march, while according to Oval Office tapes and (admittedly biased) accounts of his White House advisers, he conceived of the march much as King did: as a way of intensifying America’s revulsion at the violent methods of Southern segregationists and increasing popular approval for a voting-rights law.

There are plenty of reasons for criticizing Johnson, not least for plunging the country deeper into the Vietnam War. But shepherding two major civil-rights bills through Congress in 1964 and 1965—the most comprehensive legislation protecting the rights of black people since Reconstruction—are not among those reasons.

In response to the criticism, DuVernay has said she needed moments of dramatic tension. She’s right. But her inaccuracies about Johnson aside, her movie is devoid of any drama.

DuVernay’s characters don’t argue or laugh with one another; even when they disagree with their fellow civil-rights leaders, they don’t seem to enjoy one another’s companionship. Instead—and this is especially true of the representation of King—they give speeches to each other. They don’t talk; they declaim. And they are extraordinarily dour.

Of course, as befits a historical film, everyone shows up, at least momentarily. Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, John Lewis, Andrew Young, James Bevel, Bayard Rustin—they’re all here. Even a chastened Malcolm X puts in an appearance, apologizing to Mrs. King for his opposition to her husband’s nonviolent tactics. Yet if you don’t know anything about the complexities of the movement, or the intrigues and tensions among King’s acolytes, you would have no idea who these people are—a curious weakness in a historical drama.

In another historical saga, Lincoln, Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis humanized their hero, making Lincoln a shrewd political operator as well as a man with an often-vulgar sense of humor. In Selma, the actors—particularly David Oyelowo as King—give wooden performances because the script offers them nothing to do except be monuments to and participants in a noble event. Ironically, only Tim Roth gives his role any intricacy; he plays George Wallace with a malevolent glee.

I can’t help wondering what Spike Lee—who was originally interested in making a movie about the Selma march—might have done with the subject. Or better yet, Quentin Tarantino. Maybe Tarantino would have cast John Travolta as Lyndon Johnson, Samuel L. Jackson as Martin Luther King, and Christoph Waltz as J. Edgar Hoover. At least Tarantino’s film would have been more fun, if even more historically (and politically) incorrect.

DuVernay’s Selma is well-intentioned. But good intentions do not make a good movie.

The majority of the debate over American Sniper has been political. A smash commercial hit, it’s been lauded by the commentators on the right as a tribute to American patriotism and for appealing to the conservative heartland. It’s been denounced by those on the left as a simple-minded rationalization for the war in Iraq. The movie is neither. It’s not political at all.

Instead, American Sniper exposes the viciousness and horrors of the Iraq War from the viewpoint of the individual American soldiers who have to kill the enemy and, at the same time, avoid being slaughtered or maimed. As in a Hemingway novel, the words “sacrifice” or “heroism” have little meaning. Doing one’s job well is the sole criteria for survival.

American Sniper, however, is both historical and biographical. The movie is based on the life (and death) of Chris Kyle, played formidably by Bradley Cooper. Kyle, who served four tours of duty in Iraq, was the ultimate “volunteer.” Trained by the Navy SEALs as a sniper, he was credited with 160 “kills” but was often embarrassed when his fellow soldiers called him a “legend.” Warned by his austere father that there were three types of people in the world—sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs—Kyle became a sheepdog, whose task was to protect American soldiers from being massacred by the enemy, even if that enemy was a child or a woman.

The trauma of the war remained with Kyle when he returned home. Indeed, Eastwood has said he was making a movie not only about war but also about family. Like most veterans of any war, Kyle had difficulty readjusting to civilian and married life. As Cooper portrays him, Kyle is usually inarticulate and spooked by sounds resembling explosions. It is only when he begins to help other veterans, many of them badly wounded and psychologically damaged by the war, that he finds a new purpose as a sheepdog. And, although the movie doesn’t mention this, he started to train as a policeman. It is therefore both ironic and tragic that he is killed by a disturbed veteran on a firing range, a melancholy conclusion that the film announces in white letters on a barren black screen.

There is no way to watch this movie without being unsettled. While Selma never allows us to get emotionally close to the characters or the historical events, Eastwood and Cooper make it impossible for audiences—whatever their political allegiances—to be indifferent to what they’re watching.

Indeed, the film Sniper most resembles is The Deer Hunter, released in 1978 and exploring the emotional effects of another catastrophic war, this one in Vietnam. The Deer Hunter was equally controversial, decried by its ideological opponents as an apology for America’s venture in Vietnam. Yet The Deer Hunter was as preoccupied with the emotional consequences for those who fought in Vietnam as is American Sniper with the scarred veterans of Iraq.

Among the more devastating moments in both films are the scenes of homecoming. Robert De Niro, like Bradley Cooper, personifies a veteran ravaged by his recollections of the war, initially unable to relate to any of his friends, taking refuge in silence. And, of course, there is in both movies the mantra of “one shot,” the sniper’s credo as well as the goal of the deer hunt (early on, we see Kyle as a boy killing a deer with a single bullet), and the horrific scenes in The Deer Hunter of Russian roulette.

I do not understand how anyone can see The Deer Hunter or American Sniper and think that either movie glorifies the wars in Vietnam or Iraq. I once showed The Deer Hunter to a group of seminar students, and the film left them in tears. I think American Sniper would have the identical effect.

The issue, then, is what makes a movie historically and cinematically authentic. And what moves an audience. Selma, for all its ambition, leaves us untouched by its effort to replicate the past. Nor does the film impel us to care about its personalities.

American Sniper does not permit us to turn away from the torments of the war or from the agonies of its characters. It is precisely its passion for truth-telling and its concentration on its complicated characters that make it both a sophisticated work of history and a dazzling film.

October 30, 1938. The night before Halloween in America. After dinner, at 8:00 in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, families throughout the country gathered in their living rooms, as they usually did, to listen to the radio. At that hour, the highest-rated show on the radio was NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen and his two celebrated puppets, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. (American audiences did not seem bemused by the idea of a ventriloquist performing on the radio despite their inability to see whether or not his lips moved.)

When a musical interlude interrupted the comic dialogue between Bergen and Charlie, many listeners apparently switched the radio dial to CBS. Instantly, they found themselves in the midst of hysterical news bulletins describing a battalion of Martians landing in New Jersey. Given that Americans were now accustomed to, if no less unsettled by, constant news reports on the radio of crises in Europe and warfare in China, the Martian invasion sounded credible. And some in the audience, especially in New Jersey and New York, panicked.

What the audience really heard was a dramatization by The Mercury Theater on the Air of H.G. Welles’s 1897 novel, The War of the Worlds. The program was conceived, directed, and narrated by a 23-year-old former magician and current theater actor, Orson Welles. Already labeled a “boy genius” for his modernist versions of Shakespearean plays in New York, featured on the cover of Time magazine and profiled in the New Yorker, Welles created in his rendition of The War of the Worlds what became the most legendary radio broadcast in the history of the medium. Three years later, in 1941, Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred in another illustrious venture, this time in Hollywood: Citizen Kane, the most influential movie in the history of the American cinema.

At the end of his own movie, Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen remarks mournfully: “I’ve never forgotten. . . any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each [year], those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.” The golden age of network radio was brief. It lasted for only twenty-five years, from the mid-1920s when the NBC and CBS networks were launched, to the end of the 1940s when television supplanted radio as the principal form of household entertainment.

But for those Americans who grew up during the Depression or World War II, network radio was indispensable. NBC and CBS offered an array of programs: comedies, adventure series, mysteries, dramas, classical music, jazz, and news. The stars on radio, besides Edgar Bergen, included Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Arturo Toscanini, Benny Goodman, and Edward R. Murrow, among many others. Only the movies were more popular, and more important, during these years. Orson Welles became a master of both mediums.

Like many of his predecessors in America’s culture—Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway—Welles was an entertainer as well as an artist. He did not share the elitist preconceptions of his European counterparts. Instead he understood that art in America had to attract and enthrall audiences before they could be enlightened or encouraged to see the world differently. He was steeped in the European traditions of literature and painting, but he used these to become a virtuoso of American mass culture.

Welles had one other attribute that distinguished him from his American and European forbears: his magisterial voice. Whether on stage, on the radio, or in the movies, Welles realized that his voice could beguile an audience—as it did in his narration of The War of the Worlds, in his portrait of both the charismatic young Charles Foster Kane and in Kane’s King Lear-like old age, and in his captivating portrait of the amoral Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). In fact, Welles had all the wittiest dialogue, some of which he wrote himself, in The Third Man, including the most memorable lines in the film: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

At that moment in the movie, as in Citizen Kane and The War of the Worlds, Welles was the enchanting magician and raconteur, the global celebrity who could terrify and mesmerize audiences, while also making them ultimately laugh at their naïveté. He was a wizard at intuiting what his audiences feared and needed.

Since 1938, we have confronted a plethora of evil Martians. Nazis, Communists, sandal-clad revolutionaries, terrorists. From Pearl Harbor to the erection of the Berlin Wall to the jungles of Vietnam to the destruction of the World Trade Center, we have been engaged in a perpetual war of the worlds. So, in America, as Orson Welles recognized, it is always Halloween.

For those war babies who were teenagers in the 1950s, the ominous images of Joseph McCarthy—in newspaper photographs and newsreels, and on television—were deeply imbedded in their consciousness and remembrances. Judy Collins recalled that her father hated McCarthy for ruining people’s lives. Faye Dunaway learned that many of her professors at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts had worked in Hollywood or on television shows, but had been blacklisted for refusing to answer HUAC’s questions about whether they were members of the Communist Party. Nor were they willing to identify
those they knew of having attended Party meetings.

My own mother allowed me in the spring of 1954 to stay home from school so I could watch the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. She believed, correctly, that I would learn more from watching Senator McCarthy’s brutal performance than from anything I might be taught in class. Barney Frank’s parents felt the same way; he too remained home to watch the hearings. The drama of the hearings, especially the confrontation between McCarthy and Joseph Welsh, was riveting. Nothing matched them in intensity until the Senate Watergate hearings, broadcast on television in 1973.

Yet no one among the war babies experienced the effects of McCarthyism more personally than Carl Bernstein. In 1989, Bernstein published a memoir called Loyalties about his parents’ ties to the Communist Party and his own recollections of how much his entire family was hounded by the FBI in the 1950s. His parents were not thrilled that their son was delving into their political past, and his father refused to read the book. But they did answer his questions about what they had done and why.

Although Bernstein’s parents had withdrawn from Communist activities and meetings in the late 1940s, they did not officially leave the Party because they felt their departure would have been disloyal. For this, they paid a heavy price. They were purged from the labor movement to which they had given most of their time and energies during the 1930s and the war years, and were ostracized by their former friends (those who were blacklisted in Hollywood also found their friends avoiding them in the years of their exile).

Nevertheless, Bernstein’s parents continued to engage in left-wing politics, notably during the trial and imprisonment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Bernstein recalled that the Rosenberg case was a constant topic of dinner-table conversation, and that his parents served on committees to exonerate the couple or at least have their death sentences commuted. On June 19, 1953, Bernstein and his parents spent the entire afternoon marching in front of the White House pleading for clemency. But nothing worked. On the night of June 19, at 8:00 p.m., the Rosenbergs were electrocuted (I recall that it got very quiet in my house when the news came over the radio that the Rosenbergs were dead). Bernstein himself cried hysterically at the death of the Rosenbergs. Yet he was also angry that his parents seemed to be risking their own lives; if the Rosenbergs could be jailed and executed, he feared, then so could his mother and father.

In fact, Bernstein’s parents were under persistent surveillance by the FBI throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. Two agents even showed up at Bernstein’s Bar Mitzvah, though how his reading of the Torah could be regarded as dangerous was unknown both to Bernstein and the agents. In 1954, Bernstein’s mother was summoned to testify before HUAC. She was an “unfriendly” witness, in the parlance of the time, because she declined to name the names of her former associates in the Communist Party. Bernstein’s father explained to his son that one took the Fifth Amendment in order to protect one’s friends, that this was the ultimate symbol of trustworthiness.

Eventually, in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, Bernstein was able to read the FBI files on his parents. He discovered that there was no information in the files that identified his parents as subversive or seditious to the United States. Clark Clifford, President Truman’s closest adviser, later told Bernstein that Truman loathed Joseph McCarthy, and that Truman’s loyalty oath program and Attorney General’s list were just ways of neutralizing his political opponents on the right as well as justifying his anti-Communist foreign policy.

Still, Bernstein admitted in his book that he was exasperated at his parents for their commitment to a Communist movement that was dishonest, vicious, and (under Stalin) murderous. But at the end of his memoir, Bernstein reminded his readers that he had “tried to learn what happened in our family, and to set it down. In so doing,” he confessed, “I may or may not have committed an act of disloyalty. My mother and father never did.”

Bernstein’s memoir offered a harrowing portrait of what it was like to be the target of investigations and harassment in the Truman and Eisenhower years. So the break-ins and enemies list during Watergate seemed to Bernstein all-too-familiar. For Bernstein, the crimes of the Nixon Administration appeared to be a replay of the inquisitions during the McCarthy era, inquisitions that he had witnessed as an adolescent.

Yet for all the lives that HUAC and McCarthy wrecked, McCarthyism itself barely impinged on the culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Painters, architects, novelists, playwrights, and social critics felt little constraint in their work. On the contrary, they contributed to a cultural and intellectual efflorescence that shaped the war babies’ values and view of the world.

War Babies: The Generation That Changed America is now available online at Amazon.com

Author Richard Pells

Richard Pells has never been a traditional historian. He is primarily interested in 20th century American culture—movies, radio, television, art, music, literature, and the theater, all of which are reflected in his five books. Through his work, readers are treated to a history of American cultural life from the 1930s to the present. More